


Of Words and Wildfire

by sweetestel



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drama, Fluff, Gen, Happy Ending, Immortality, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-17
Updated: 2011-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetestel/pseuds/sweetestel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Spoilers up to season 3) The day his secret is revealed, Merlin dies on the stake. And then he wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Words and Wildfire

**Author's Note:**

> I’m once again grateful to the brilliant [kathkin](http://kathkin.livejournal.com) for her help! All remaining mistakes are mine.

I can feel them. The flames, shivering, licking my skin, biting my legs. They’re burning off the clothes as well as the body underneath, making the fabric melt with the man I am, the man who’ll soon be talked about in the past tense.   
I’m in pain, it hurts all over, and I don’t, no, I don’t think I’ve ever felt such pain in my entire life. Not the lies, not the betrayals, the grief, the death of the ones I loved, nothing has ever been this painful. I can feel the blood hot under my skin as it flows, but I’m wondering if it’s really the blood that’s burning me. The fire is like a monster devouring me, making me writhe between its teeth, breaking me, breaking every bit of me.    
I want to shout how much it hurts, but I won’t. I want to shout that it’s not fair, that I haven’t killed anyone, I haven’t done anything, but I won’t. I want to call for help, to call for him, to cry his name, and I try, so hard, but I    
_can’t_   
 and then- everything is gone.

*

I wake up in my cell again. It’s the same, ten by ten cell, with cold air, dry, hard ground and the luxury of a blanket that has been offered to me.

I hear the doors and the keys, the pace of the knights coming to my cell. And I think,    
_oh, whatever’s going on, the King mustn’t like it._

The knights stop in front of my cell and one of them glares at me. There’s something that I can’t recognize mixed with the fear and hatred in his eyes. His voice loud, he asks:   
“Will you comply, sorcerer?”

I get up, back pressed against the cold wall of my cell, my knees aching. I don’t understand.   
“I will.”

The door creaks as he opens it. It’s a sinister sound that feels like the echo of all the lost souls haunting this place. It sounds like a sign, a warning; I don’t even have the time to shiver before two other knights hold me by the arms and drag me out.    
We walk up the stairs again, and I still don’t understand. We walk through the corridors, through the courtyard, and still, still I don’t understand.

When they put me back on the stake and I feel the flames licking me again, I understand.

*

“Don’t watch it,” I told Gwen. She cried, so much, cried that she didn’t understand, that it wasn’t fair. She cried that I couldn’t die, and that someone had to do something, and I said: “Don’t hate him.”

-

“Don’t get killed,” I told Morgana when she visited me, after she had shout at the knights to get away from her. I don’t think the King had any idea where she was.    
Sir Leon had stepped back to the end of the corridor, so that he could keep an eye on her and so that she would stop trying to scratch him till he bled. He had looked at me, right before he had left; a look saying    
_I don’t trust you, but I trust you enough_   
. 

She told me to get out of here, to escape, to do something because I    
_could_   
, she said that she’d help because I helped her before, helped her so much, and this wasn’t fair, and,   
_why didn’t I tell her?_   
“I knew the risks,” I said, answering all of her questions at once.   
I grasped the bar above where her hand was and looked at her in the eyes, murmuring the only thing I could bring myself to say.   
“Don’t get killed.” 

-

“Don’t blame yourself,” I told him.

  
“Tell me this isn’t true. Tell me that this is trickery or a mistake or a curse. Tell me I misunderstood,    
_tell me I’m wrong, Merlin._   
Tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll get you out of here, I promise. Just tell me,” he said. I thought never seeing him again and yet here he was, right before my eyes, and suddenly I wished I was blind, I wished he wasn’t here. The gaze he had fixed on me, the pain obvious in his movements, in his paces, even in the way he breathed.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and tears began to fall, the last tears of my life I thought. “But I can’t. I can’t lie to you anymore. I lied, I know I lied, I lied about so many things, for such a long time, and keeping it a secret, it was, you can’t imagine, I-and I’m so sorry. But I didn’t betray you, I didn’t, I never did. Arthur!”

And then he was gone. He had turned around and left the cell, and I ran after him, I did, but it was too late. I was only hurting my hands on the rusted bars of the door and hearing his footsteps fading away, and I couldn’t think, but I had to think, just one thing, one thing to tell him before I died, the most important thing…   
“Don’t blame yourself!” 

-

“I’m so glad you’re not here,” I said to my empty cell. “I’m so glad you won’t be here to see this,” I told Gaius.

* 

Arthur leaving my cell was just one of the many signs of my imminent death, alongside the stake being built up in the courtyard.   
But I knew long before that I was going to die.

“It is now time for you to know that to make the young Pendragon a King, there are some flames you will have to walk through.”

Or, well, I thought I was.

*

They try the flames, a thousand times or so. They try to behead me as well. Uther calls for the most qualified witch-killers who try new methods, but nothing works. They take it for arrogance, for evil.    
The creature that couldn’t be killed; I’d soon be one of those stories little boys tell themselves to get scared, back in Ealdor. 

“Haven’t you spread enough pain?” the King asks me once, the last time I’ll ever see him. He looks so tired, so old. “Couldn’t you show some respect and die for the crimes you’ve committed?”

After that day, they stop trying. As if the King’s words weren’t directed to me but to himself.

*

I don’t have many visitors. Gwen tried to come, in the beginning, but then things changed and she couldn’t be here so often any more. Morgana left, or so I feel.    
No one would address me, apart from Sir Leon, who, every morning as a young boy brings me my meal, like the very first time he saw me in a cell, asks:   
“Will you comply, sorcerer?”

I talk to him, sometimes. Ask him how things are, up there, but he’s not allowed to say much; he just nods, smiles sometimes, and I see it now, that he doesn’t hate me, and I don’t think he has ever really hated me, but at least he doesn’t fear me anymore. Not after all these times I kind-of-died but not exactly. I think he pities me.

The boy is too scared to notice anything.

*

I wake up, one morning, and something has changed in the air. Since the first day I’ve been locked away, nothing has ever felt like this, nothing has ever changed. 

I can hear someone in the corridor, coming to the cell, quick, hurried pace.   
“Get up!” Leon says, as soon as he reaches the door, out of breath.   
“What’s wrong?”   
He crosses the cell in two steps and takes me by the arms.   
“Get up, I said.”   
His grasp is violent but what surprises me most is when he pats me on the arms, brushing invisible dust off my tunic -   
_I magic my clothes cleaned, thank you very much!_   
\- backing me up against the wall.

“Leon?” I ask, and we hear people coming from the end of the corridor.    
“The King wants to see you,” he says, steadily, a bit too formally, and steps back. At the same moment two other knights enter the cell and-

And I don’t care what they’re doing here, not even a little. My frown has vanished. Arthur just stepped in and all the breath leaves my body. He looks so- and the knights, staring at the ground, so respectful.    
_The King._   
My palms rest on the wall behind me, and I take a deep breath, I just need to be sure this is real. 

He doesn’t say hello, doesn’t ask how I am, doesn’t say sorry or try to kill me, nor does he have any comment about my beard even though I catch him looking at it. Looking at me. And the anticipation might kill me if he doesn’t talk.

“Would you like to get out of here?”   
Sir Leon smiles a bit but still stares respectfully at his boots.    
_Arthur._   
 He looks tired, looks like he doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, but in a regal kind of way.   
“I’m. Not sure.”

He loses a little of his composure, tries to think of something to say. He looks at me, examining each of my features, seeing what has changed, what is still the same, and I don’t try to stop myself from doing the same. The eyes, as blue as ever, his golden hair shining in the lone ray of sunlight, and his broad shoulders, and his lips-   
“Get out,” he says.    
I frown for a second, but then he turns his head to the side and says:   
“I’m talking to you, idiots, not to him!” 

The knights look startled but Leon manages a “Yes, sure, of course my Lord” and they leave with the same deference that they entered with. 

“They’re not idiots.” I smile. It feels so good. Arthur is about to answer, but freezes. Something’s suddenly different in his eyes and his gaze falls to the ground. He swallows and takes a few breaths, and I’m dying to go to him and hold him, stop him from breaking, but I’m too afraid to see everything fade away if I leave the solid reality of the wall at my back.

“I’m sorry,” he struggles to say, looking up again. “I- I apologize. For the things you went through and the things your people went through. For the pain. For- for what I did, or what I didn’t do, rather. And I know there isn’t anything I could say or do that could change this- all those years of pain and hatred between our kinds. But I want to start from the beginning again. I want to try. From now on, magic isn’t banned in this kingdom anymore. You’re free. You can go wherever you want. You can go and never look back again.”

He pauses for a second and I realize how much he has changed while I was lost down here. How much I missed him.    
“Or you can stay. If you want to. We could rebuild everything, we could- we could help our people. We could-    
_work things out._   
”

I don’t even have to listen to him, I’d say yes to whatever he asks, whatever he wants me to do, whoever he wants me to be.    
“Could we?”

I’ve never seen so much hope in his eyes.    
“Yeah, we could.”

I laugh, and close my eyes, blinking away the sudden tears. My thumbs are rubbing the stones of the wall, palms sweated, holding what’s been my world for months and maybe even for years.    
“Merlin,” he says and I push myself away from the wall, feeling like jumping off a cliff, feeling lost, falling, and what if I open my eyes and he’s not here, what if I fall, how am I ever standing up again?

His hand falls from my neck to my shoulder, grabbing me, pulling me towards him, saying my name again, and I hold him tighter than what is probably acceptable for a King but he doesn’t seem to mind.    
The tears make their way down my cheeks and I don’t even care what their destiny might be. 

“You were going for a hug, right?” I ask, nose hidden in his neck.   
He laughs softly, holds me closer.   
“Yeah, I was going for a hug.”


End file.
